Exploring the shrinking marvel of Lake Powell

I grew up thinking of
Lake Powell as sacred in the way that a mass grave is sacred. But
I’m also a practical person, and I see the lake as a giant
highway offering access to some of the most spectacular country in
the West. It was the practical side that agreed when my wife
suggested spending three days sea kayaking the lake for our
anniversary.

The last time I saw the reservoir was 20
years ago, when I was 17 and my friends and I called it Lake Foul.
After getting snowed out of a backpacking trip, we headed toward
the dammed-up Colorado, over a bumpy road to the lake. One of the
first things we saw after reaching the still water was a dead cow,
submerged, its legs sticking cartoonishly out of its bloated body.

This time we embarked from a gravelly beach in
loaded-down kayaks: No cows, alive or dead. Then, prodded by an old
guidebook’s promise of a canyon, a campsite and a glorious
hike, we paddled past the pain in our shoulders and up a
half-drowned, serpentine canyon. We paddled beyond my fears of the
depths and the cow-eating catfish lurking in the murk among the
skeletons of old cottonwoods; past a houseboat as big as a
doublewide, a rainbow-colored Gay Pride flag snapping in the wind
behind it; and we mingled with some young motorboaters, who liked
to use their concert-magnitude sound system to test the acoustics
of the canyon with bass-heavy, chest-vibrating hip hop.

Which, really, was perfect. But when we got to the end of the
canyon, here’s what we found: A grotto of
steeper-than-vertical cliffs. Somewhere up top was the
guidebook’s perfect campsite, but it was impossible to reach
except by helicopter. The guidebook, though, wasn’t wrong.
The lake was wrong.

It turns out the author of our
guidebook conducted his initial reconnaissance of the lake in 1988,
before the drought hit with full force, and one dry year after
another left the lake draining like a bathtub. By 2004, the
lake’s surface had plummeted to an elevation of 3,570 feet,
or some 130 feet lower than it was when my friends and I gleefully
watched crawdads devour that bloated bovine’s eyeballs. As a
result, all the prime campsites and hiking spots and canyons are
not where they were, in relation to the lake, a decade ago.

In fact, we had to paddle all the way out of the canyon
and back down-lake before we found a place flat enough to set up
our tent. The storm arrived not long after: We knew it was coming
because it was only Saturday afternoon and the boat traffic was all
heading back towards the marina, and because the sky around the
Henry Mountains was black, illuminated periodically by lightning.

Hunkered down in our old Wal-Mart tent, its leaks held at
bay by an old tarp bungeed to the top, we listened to the rain pour
down on the rocks and a flash flood roar nearby. I envisioned the
same thing happening all around the lake, even all around the
Colorado Plateau -- raindrops gathering and flowing into the rivers
and then into the lake. I envisioned it rising up, lifting up our
kayaks, and carrying them away.

But when we awoke, the
lake seemed not to have risen a bit. The storm had tripled the size
of the Colorado River near Moab. Little arroyos became torrents
overnight. But all of that water could only raise the lake by about
four inches, most of which was lost over the next week. Since 2004,
similar downpours have been common, and we’ve had at least
one big winter. But the water has come up only 30 feet.

Theoretically, this means that the reservoir could be full again in
just 10 more years. But it’s not likely. During the last
decade, the water flowing into the lake has been consistently below
the 45-year average; the outflows – needed to generate power
and supply downstream users -- have remained the same. It would
take a sopping-wet decade to fill up Lake Powell again.

A
lot of people want to take the dam down, from respectable
professionals to raving eco-terrorists, for whom breaching the dam
is the act that will lead them to their own version of a
martyr’s paradise: A place in the plunge pool of Cathedral in
the Desert surrounded by 72 buff hippy chicks. Nature will probably
beat them to the punch, however, slowly draining the lake and
returning it, over centuries, to what it once was -- a river.

Jonathan Thompson is a contributor to Writers on
the Range, a service of High Country News (hcn.org) in Paonia,
Colorado. He becomes the paper’s editor on Nov.
5.